Batsmen always want to play at the top of the order. This might be because they realise that you get more recognition up there. Well we’d like to recognise Ian Bell’s middle-order skills.

Runs equal plaudits and while top-order batsmen face the new ball, they can also approach batting however they want.

If Alastair Cook makes a decent score, he will do so at a steady rate of three runs an over. Maybe he’ll score at 2.8 runs an over if things are tough. After he passes 150, he might open his shoulders and score at 3.2 runs an over, but probably not. He does what he does and he does it astonishingly well.

Ian Bell isn’t allowed to play like that though. Before Cook goes out to bat, Graham Gooch sidles up to him, twirls his moustache and says: “Score at exactly three runs an over, Alastair. No more. No less.”

Poor Graham. It’s not his 44 thousand (FOURTY FOUR THOUSAND!) first class runs, nor being England’s leading test run scorer of all time that defines the man. No, it is his moustache. Which he shaved off in about 1998.